Miss Cynthia's Rosebush

by Jennette Lee

Miss Cynthia's Rosebush

BY JENNETTE LEE

MISS CYNTHIA'S crying!

The group outside the fence fluttered and jostled and crowded close, peering through. No one of them was tall enough to see over.

But between the pickets they could see Miss Cynthia bending over a rose-bush by the path and they could see the handkerchief raised hastily to her eyes as her fingers lifted a broken stem and drew it up.

They were astounded.

"You did it, Jimmie Hallam!"

"I never did!"

"You did, too. You just run and jumped—and you hit it!"

"I—never," he muttered.

They held on to the pickets, watching Miss Cynthia.

She reached to the place where the broken stem hung limp, and severed it carefully from the bush and held it in her fingers, looking down at it—and now they could see that she was crying in earnest—great drops that rolled down her cheeks and were wiped hastily off. They turned away from the fence, awestruck.

As soon would they have expected the meeting-house steeple to cry—or the marble lady among the shrubbery in the little park on Main Street. They went with lagging steps, looking back to Miss Cynthia's house. She had gone in and closed the door, and the broken rose-bush by the path remained a mere stump of a rose.

"You never'd ot-to 'a' gone in her yard, Jimmie Hallam!"

"I had to get my ball, didn't I! What 'd Tom Nutty want to t'row it over her fence for, anyway?"

"I didn't know where it would go!" protested Tom.

"No—he didn't know! You ot-to be ashamed of yourself, Jimmie Hallam!"

"Well—I ain't!" he said, shamefacedly.

"I shouldn't think a grown-up woman would cry!"

"Come on!" said Lydia Bowley. She was small and dark and round, with cheeks that glowed like two little apples. "Come on!" she said. "I ain't going to think about it! Let's play hop-scotch!"

They marked off the lines on the hard earth of the side-path and drove broken bits of blue-and-white china from number one to ten, with stubby, determined toes.

Passers-by skirted the place and left the marks intact.

No one would have guessed, watching the intent, eager heads bent above the game, that each small, round head held a shocked place in which was engraven the vision of Miss Cynthia Adams crying in her front yard.

Not till dark did they leave the hop-scotch lines and straggle home. And not till supper had been eaten and they were being tucked in bed did the vision reassert itself.

Lydia Bowley, being rocked in her mother's arms a few minutes, before she was sent up-stairs to bed, brought her lips close to her mother's ear.

"Miss Cynthia Adams had her rose-bush broke to-day," she said.

"Did she? That was too bad!"

"Yes. ... she cried. ..."

"What!"

Lydia felt that her shot had gone home. It seemed to justify the haunting feeling of tragedy that tugged at her.

"She cried and she used her handkerchief."

"Well, well, I wouldn't think about it any more."

"No'm." It was a deep sigh of relief. At the confessional of ages she had been absolved, and her eyes closed sleepily to the gentle motion of the rockers.

When Mrs. Bowley came down from tucking Lydia in bed and giving a soft kiss to the round, flushed cheek, her face was thoughtful. She took up her sewing from the basket on the table and scanned it.

Her husband shifted his paper a little. "I see eggs have gone up," he said.

"Yes." She sighed a little and fitted the patch in place with thoughtful fingers. "Lydia said she saw Miss Cynthia crying to-day—"

"What!" He put down his paper and thrust up his spectacles and stared across at her.

She nodded. "It seems funny, doesn't it?"

"Oh, the child just got some notion." He dismissed it.

"No, she said she saw her. She said her rosebush was broken."

He shook his head. "It won't do. I've seen Cynthia at two funerals without a tear—one of 'em her own father. I don't know as I blame her so much for that one!" he added, with a grim smile.

"Jim—!"

"Well, just because a man's dead, don't make what he's been any better, does it? Cyrus Adams was a mean, self-centered, hard-hearted man. You know that!" He looked across at her accusingly.

"Yes," she assented, "I know he was."

"Well, then, what are you 'Jim-ming' me about?"

"I wonder what the matter was," she said absently.

"With Cyrus?"

"No, no. Of course not! I know it was so. About Cynthia. I could see the child was shocked."

"Well she might be! I should have been!"

He turned to the door. A man in slippers and house coat stood in it, an unlighted pipe in his hand. Bowley greeted him with a smile.

"Come on in, Hudson. What do you think Lydia has brought home as the latest cock-and-bull story—Cynthia Adams crying in her front yard over a rosebush!" He chuckled.

The other man looked down at his pipe. "Have you got a match?" he asked.

James Bowley felt in his pockets and produced a match and tossed it over.

"That's the worst of electricity!" he said. "No creature comforts!"

The other lighted his pipe and stood by the mantel, smoking. He thought his sister-in-law looked a little tired as she bent over the torn coat and fitted the patch skilfully in place. He was glad neither of them seemed conscious in speaking about Cynthia. It showed how completely they had forgotten. Everybody had forgotten! He drew two or three whiffs and strolled to the back of the table and looked down at the books and papers scattered on it, fingering them idly. Then he went out of the room. His steps were heard going up-stairs.

James Bowley put down his paper with a half-guilty look of amusement.

"I declare, I forgot all about Hudson and Cynthia!" he said. She looked up helplessly from the coat.

"Forgot—?"

"Hudson used to go with her, you know."

"Oh, that was years ago."

"Yes."

They went on reading the paper and mending the patch.

Up-stairs, Hudson Bowley moved restlessly about his room. He examined his bank-account and found an error, months back, that he had been searching for, off and on, and righted it. Then he sighed and looked at the book. His balance was getting too large. He must invest again. ... And it made so little difference whether the balance was large or small! He pushed it away irritably and got out his coat from the closet and changed his slippers, taking care that his pipe did not go out meanwhile. He might as well get some matches—and he would sleep better for a little walk.

As he passed the sitting-room door his sister-in-law called out to him, "Got your key, Hudson?"

"Yes." He looked in and nodded. "I sha'n't be out late. I'm going to take a turn around the block."

He carried out with him into the darkness a picture of the two in the sitting-room, the man and woman on either side the lamp. He knew his sister-in-law was tired and Jim was selfish, but they were happy together. Every day he saw them meet life. And he knew that they literally "halved sorrows and doubled joys. ..." For himself, he had missed it! He knocked the ashes from his pipe on a fence railing, and stowed it in his pocket.

Then he saw that the fence was Miss Cynthia's. It was almost the only fence left in town, he thought, grimly. Cyrus Adams had insisted on keeping up his fences to the last. He didn't want folks tramping all over his grass, he said. Well, he had a fence around his lot in the cemetery now, cast-iron, painted black. Nobody trampled on his grass there, either.

Hudson Bowley's thoughts were a little cynical as he stood looking at the darkened house. No light appeared in it anywhere, and the moon rising behind the house made the darkness of the front seem almost black. But in the yard the light blooming flowers and the low shrubs stood out in shimmering relief. ... All the flowers in the yard had been planted since Cyrus Adams's death. The first year there had been a straggling attempt at candytuft and nasturtiums in a pathetic little row along by the house. The next spring the whole lawn had been spaded up and there were flowers everywhere. And every day Cynthia worked among the flowers.

Hudson Bowley knew pretty well what went on in Miss Cynthia's yard. He passed it four times a day on the way to the mill and back. Sometimes Cynthia looked up and bowed to him distantly. But more often she bent in absorption over her flowers. And he went by without a glance. He had never stood as he was standing now, staring in on the flowers that lifted themselves in the mysterious half-light against the blackness of the house. ... A subtle fragrance stole over the fence, of mignonette and phlox and candytuft. It seemed to tangle itself in his brain and waken something puzzling there. He turned away vaguely and walked on. He could not rid himself of "Miss Cynthia and her rosebush"—and Cynthia crying!

He went on, past the fence, across the park to Main Street, and turned in at the drug-store for a box of matches. When he had lighted his pipe again he strolled back across the little park. In the shrubbery on the right a marble figure gleamed mistily. There was a bench near the statue, and he went in and sat down, smoking and looking up at the graceful half-poised figure that seemed to spring out of the green tracery of the leaves and branches and hold itself back from flight. The night had put him in a curious turmoil For years he had not thought of Cynthia Adams as he was thinking of her now. At first, after the quarrel, it had been hard not to think of her. She had thrown him over for a whim—hardly more, it seemed to him. Her father needed her, she said. And to his protest that other girls who had fathers married and were happy, she only said, over and over, "You do not understand."

No, he had not understood. He was willing to admit it now. Any more than he had understood the life that Cynthia chose to lead. She devoted herself to her father and to his needs—not abjectly, but with a kind of proud dignity that seemed to give itself freely and ask no pity from any one. ... Everybody who knew Cyrus Adams knew that he was a selfish man—but not a hoarding one. He spent his money for whatever would give him pleasure or add to his importance, and Cynthia as part of his importance was always comely and well dressed, and her clothes were chosen with the exquisite taste that was a part of Cynthia. Hudson Bowley had seen them change from the floppy, flowered fashions of twelve years back, to the scant draperies and severe skirts of later times, and then at last to an austerity that seemed to have little relation to the prevailing style—as little as the tenuous draperies of the marble lady there on her pedestal. Cynthia's clothes seemed merely to belong to Cynthia—though they were still very becoming.

He sat looking up at the statue and smoking reflectively. Cynthia had hardly grown—any more than the statue up there. There was something girlish in her figure and her quick step, and in her unwrinkled face—not the soft, flabby comfort of massage, but something fine like porcelain, as if a light glaze held its smoothness untouched. Curiously, he found himself wondering whether over his own feelings, too, there had been a little fine glaze that had kept him from feeling things too much. He smiled cynically, and rapped his pipe on the bench, and leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees, looking up at the cool figure amid the green of the shrubbery. He knew suddenly why he liked the statue and why he had so often turned in here to sit with his paper or his pipe. It had been a kind of assurance to him that change was not needed—that, once a choice was made and accepted, it had a beauty and meaning of its own. And now the quiet was broken for him. Miss Cynthia had been crying in her front yard. Cynthia crying—that hurt a little, somehow!

He got up impatiently and moved off. There was nothing a man could do—and what did he want to do? Nothing. Of that he was sure. ... There was not in his heart a vestige of the feeling that had hurled him away from Cynthia Adams twelve years ago. ... He had battled then, and almost cursed her for her immovable, doll-like obstinacy! But to-night he could only wonder a little at himself and at life—and there was the discomfort that Cynthia should- have wept about the rosebush. He came again to her fence and looked over to the house as he passed.

A single light shone in the room on the right. The shade was not drawn, and through the thin curtains he saw a figure standing by the table, looking down at something.

He carried the picture home with him. And in his dreams Cynthia came like some remote Byzantine statue—a kind of slim caryatid, bearing on her uplifted head a heavy marble lintel, and in her hand she carried an earthen flower-pot, dull red, with a single rose-stalk growing in it, as straight and slim as Cynthia herself. ...

When he came down to breakfast, after the troubled night, the room was empty—except for Lydia sitting at her mother's desk, a sheet of paper spread before her. The tip of her tongue was held firmly between her teeth, and her legs curled themselves about the rounds of the chair as she formed letters with slow care and dipped her pen in ink. She did not look up.

"Hello, Lydia!"

"Good-morning," she replied, absently.

He seated himself at the table.

"Had your breakfast?" he asked.

There was no response. Her fingers traced a slow, difficult curve, then she looked up and nodded with satisfaction.

"I've had breakfast," she announced. "I'm writing a letter," she added, with dignity.

"Oh! To any one in particular?"

"No."

He dismissed his curiosity and watched with amusement while she took an envelope from the pigeonhole and wrote and licked and sealed it and pounded it down with her fat, grim fist. She climbed down from her chair.

"Going to post it?" he inquired, politely.

She nodded without speaking. His eyes twinkled as they followed her from the door. He felt grown-up and superior and very kindly toward the small figure grasping its letter tight and hurrying with importance from the room. If any one had suggested to him that Lydia bore the guise of Fate and carried destiny in her hand—messenger to the gods—he would have laughed out. She was an amusing little thing and you couldn't head her off once she got an idea.

That summed up Lydia.

He attacked his breakfast with such appetite as he could summon after a night of troubled statues and flower-pots and dreams.

In the little room off her kitchen Cynthia Adams stood back from the table and surveyed it—to see that everything was in place.

The table, with its dark, polished surface and straight legs, stood facing a window that was covered with a curtain of transparent scrim fulled a little at top and bottom and held in place by small brass rods. The light, falling through this curtain on the polished table and delicate china and silver, seemed etherealized—like pictured sunlight. The great copper bowl of flowers that stood against the gathered scrim completed the effect of an Old World picture.

The room might have been "an interior" painted with loving skill by some Dutch or Flemish artist. And the woman standing with her hand on the tall chair, looking thoughtfully down at the table, belonged in the picture. The eyes set wide apart and the reposeful, unmoved face were those of a Flemish portrait. Only the eyes seemed a little reddened about the lids, as if something had lately disturbed their serene quiet.

She turned from the table and brought a little silver pitcher of cream and a dish of cereal from the kitchen, and sat down. A book was on the table by her plate, and before she began to eat she opened it, laying a glass paper-weight on it to hold it open. All her movements were gentle and quiet and undisturbed. Only the faint redness of the lids betrayed a sleepless night and the long hours of lying awake and watching the past stream before her. She tried to read, but after a minute she pushed back the book, impatient, and her eyes stared through the transparent folds of the curtain out into the yard beyond. There were flowers everywhere. Last year there had been almost nothing in the side yard. But in the fall she had ordered perennials, great quantities of phlox and sweet-williams and larkspur and hollyhocks and pinks; before the summer was over her yard would be a mass of flowers. But there had been only the one rose, set out in the spring and watched with jealous care. She sat thinking of it absently—how frail the rose had been, and how she had nourished it back to life. The first thing in the morning and the last at night she bent over it and watched the pink bud emerge from its green sheath and push out toward the light. The nurseryman had warned her not to let it blossom this first summer—to cut off any buds that appeared and save the life for the roots. But she had not the heart to do it. Several times with shears in hand she approached it—only to turn away and leave it unharmed. And yesterday there was the pink bud, curling a little at the edge in crisp fullness. The first rose she ever had—of her own!

She sat staring with puzzled eyes, wondering dully why she had cried. Not since her mother's death had she cried. She had not let herself think or feel or desire anything apart from the trust that had been left to her. She could hear still the words whispered in the darkened room: "He is a weak man, Cynthia, and you will hold him as I have. Do not leave him, child. You will not leave him!" And she had promised gladly—not blindly. She had known what the promise meant—to steady a weakness just below pride-level, to fill each day with importance and a sense of dignity and keep him level with life. She skimmed the thought lightly and turned away. She had no shame before her promise, but she did not dwell on it if she could help. As to what was happening to herself, she had never given it a thought—until now.

She got up from the table and went into the front room. The rose on its single stalk stood in a vase on the table, and she bent to it and inhaled the opening fragrance and touched it with her finger gently.

A sound at the front door startled her. She turned her head a little. It was not a knock—hardly a sound, more as if a mouse rustled a piece of paper across the floor for its nest. She waited a minute. Then she moved to the door and opened it. There was no one in sight—only the flowers filling the yard with color and fragrance. She stood looking out at them happily. The sunlight falling on her hair and shoulders traced pretty patterns, and her hair glimmered with gold. She turned back, and her eye fell on something on the floor. She stooped to it—a crumpled paper that had been pulled back by the opening door. She picked it up, smoothing it a little, and read the sprawling inscription with a faint smile—"For Mis Sinthy."

She carried it to the front room where the rose stood on the table, and opened it. There were only two lines in the round, laborious hand—

"We ar sory for the rosebush."

She laid it on the table and stared down at it, and brushed a blur from her eyes and stared again. ... And all the overwhelming flood of the night was upon her. She fell to her knees, groping blindly and sobbing in great, choking breaths. The clock on the wall ticked its time gently. The rose unfolded the tip of a petal without motion and shed its fragrance in the room. And Miss Cynthia, on her knees, was weeping away the hardness and repression and the bitter longing that choked life in her. The sun traveled across the floor, and the shadows of the small-paned windows traveled with it and crossed Miss Cynthia. She was very quiet now. The ticking of the clock with its swinging, restful rhythm brought the sound of home to her. Through the open door she could see the sunlight and the curtained window and the table beneath it. She did not move to clear the table or wash the dishes or put her house in order. Her eyes turned to the rose on the table. In their reddened, swollen lids they rested on it lingeringly.

After a time she got up and bent to the flower, and touched it with a kind of wonder and reverence, and her broken face quivered a little. She smiled and nodded to the rose as if it understood her. She glanced at the clock.

Half past eleven! But she did not put on her work-apron. Instead, she brought out her hat and gloves from the closet, and a basket and pair of garden shears. But when she saw her face and eyes in the glass as she put on the hat, she took it off hastily and ran up-stairs and bathed her face and eyes again and again.

When at last she came down and stepped out into the sunlight she had a sense that a new Cynthia went with her down the path—a Cynthia strangely like a girl she had known, but stronger and full of buoyant life. She moved along the paths, gathering handfuls of flowers and filling the basket on her arm. Voices from over the fence came to her and she moved toward it, and paused. Then she went quickly to the gate and opened it. The group behind the fence had broken like quicksilver as she approached, but at her voice it came together again and moved slowly toward her. She was holding the gate ajar and smiling at them.

"Won't you come in?" she asked.

They came to the gate in awed silence.

"Come in!" she urged. The flowers on her arm, the little, quivering smile on her lip, seemed to beckon them. "I will pick you some flowers," she said.

They crowded about the gate. But they did not enter.

"It's dinner-time," explained Lydia Bowley. Lydia's heart was thumping in little knocks and her voice sounded suddenly strange and far away.

Cynthia smiled. "Of course it is dinner-time! I forgot! But you will come some other time, perhaps?" The wistful eyes might have been another child begging to be taken in.

They nodded, embarrassed.

"We'll come this afternoon, maybe," said Tom Nutty, gruffly; "after school, maybe."

They all nodded again gravely.

Her eyes danced at them. Why had she never seen how adorable they were? She longed to take the little girl—the red-cheeked one with hair in two straight braids, and hug her!

"Be sure you come!" she said. "I shall look for you!"

They nodded again and withdrew. Cynthia stood with her hand on the gate, swinging it and watching them trail away out of sight. Then she turned back to her flowers.

A man passing outside the fence glanced in. Miss Cynthia, bending to the mignonette-bed and gathering great handfuls and heaping it in her basket, was smiling to herself. She did not look up or see the man across the fence. He went on a little grimly. Cynthia was getting almost as self-centered as Cyrus, he told himself—shut in there behind her fence with her flowers.

Just then she lifted her head and looked up and saw him. He almost stopped in surprise at the light in her face. It seemed to question him with a little smile, half-afraid, across the fence. His own smile leaped to meet it before he knew. Then he lifted his hat gravely and passed on.

He drew a quick breath.

Cynthia Adams! Well! He would not have believed Cynthia could look like that! All the little happy thoughts of the past came out of sleep and flocked about him, begging to be taken up, till he shook them off. Absurd! All that was done with—years ago. ... But through the afternoon, in and out through his work, he saw the look in Cynthia's eyes questioning and timid like a child's delight.

When he put on his hat to go home, a resolve was forming under the confused thought of Cynthia. If she was there in her garden he would stop, perhaps, for a minute's chat by the fence.

But when he came abreast of the fence, even before he reached it, he was aware of a difference—something that made him look quickly over the fence. Voices in Cynthia's yard, and laughter, and children running up and down the paths as if they had always been there, as if Cynthia always had children in her front yard. He stared at them and glanced at Cynthia, with her flushed face and shining eyes—and raised his hat and went on.

They gathered about her, waiting for what might come next. There had already been lemonade and cakes on the back porch—all the lemonade you could drink! And Miss Cynthia had picked a bunch of flowers for each child and placed the stems in water, "to have a drink" before they were carried home in hot hands. It was not so much the flowers that worked enchantment, nor even the lemonade, as it was the sense of wonder at being in Miss Cynthia's yard and finding that when you came close to her like this her eyes were full of little dancing lights. It was like a dream of a strange wild bird that lights in your hands if you hold them up, and nestles close and makes you very happy—something like that they may have felt if they could not say it. ... To-morrow they might criticize or wonder, but now they only drank it in, standing grouped about her and waiting what might happen next.

She was swinging her hat idly, her eyes smiling and her face full of the little quivering light that looked down on them.

"Have you had a good time?" she asked.

"Yes! Yes!"

"You bet!" from Jimmie Hallam.

She turned to him. "You are the boy—?" she said.

The group held its breath. Lydia pressed forward.

"Jimmie didn't mean to!" she said, breathless. "Tom Nutty t'rowed the ball—and we all looked on." She gulped a little at the last words.

Then to their surprise Miss Cynthia laughed out. She threw back her head and laughed like a girl—laughed till little tears twinkled in her eyes—and they all joined in, looking at one another shyly.

Cynthia wiped the tears away and regarded Lydia. "You're very conscientious, aren't you, child?" The little quivering smile danced on her lips.

"Yes-m." It was a venture on Lydia's part. She saw deep water ahead.

Cynthia patted the dark, straight little braids. "That's right! But be careful, dear—not to be too conscientious, won't you? It's dangerous, being too conscientious! ... I ought to know all about that!" she said, under her breath. "Come now, just one more thing and then you must go!"

They followed her to the corner of the house in expectant silence, while she took down a large basket from the corner of the porch and lifted a paper that covered it.

They pressed close.

It was filled to the brim with nuts and the little bags of confection sacred to Christmas-time and Christmas trees. She portioned them out with swift fingers, filling their pockets with nuts and the little bags till they fairly bulged.

"There!" she said. "That's all!" She turned the basket upside down and gave it a shake. "That's all!" she said.

"It's like Christmas-time, ain't it?" said Tom Nutty.

She waited a minute. She wanted them to understand. But it was difficult to find the words.

"That's what I wanted it to be—like Christmas!" she said, slowly. "Something happened to me yesterday that made me very happy—as glad as when the Christ-child came—and I wanted to share it with you. ... Do you understand, children?"

"Oh, yes'm! We understand." they said.

And, looking into their eyes, she knew they did understand. What to older people might have seemed only queerness was to them the breaking of bread because new life had come to her. She nodded to them in comradeship.

"That's right. You will come again, won t you?'

"Oh yes, we'll come!" reassuringly.

"We'll stop a good many times—when we're going by, maybe."

"I shall watch for you. Good-by!"

She stood at the gate again and watched them go—wondering at the difference in the world—all the thousand little threads tangled in her heart and reaching over the fence and away!

She went slowly into the house and stopped with a start. The breakfast-table in front of the scrim curtain had not been touched!

All day she had been sewing bags and planning for the impromptu party. Her house was in confusion—nut-shells were on the floor, and bits of tarleton and bright worsteds and broken fragments of candy everywhere. Nothing was as it should be, and she reached out her hands to it in a quick little gesture of welcome.

Then she tied on her apron and set to work. And all the while underneath her thoughts ran the happy sense that beauty and cleanliness were only a part of life—and duty was only a part. Yet for years she had known only duty and cleanliness and beauty—nothing else. Duty first, because she had given her promise and because her father needed her. Looking back now, she could forgive it all—the promise and all it had cost her. She had steeled herself against self-pity and done her duty. But under it her heart had been often disdainful, and the duty she performed so punctiliously had held scorn for the weakness that accepted it and even craftily, she knew, counted on her promise. But now it was swept away—all the hardness, and she saw only the futile life that had needed her—the pity of it. She saw it as her mother must have seen it in the clearness of death. For it seemed to her she, too, had passed through the cleansing fire of death—all that had been important before was swept into the urge of this new life. All her delight in faultless beauty, all her pride in neatness, was gone, and in place of it—this singing joy and comradeship.

She dried her china and silver with careful touch and polished the shining table, looking out through the transparent curtain on her flowers. Beside the path stood the rosebush that had been broken off. ... It stood very straight and stiff—a mere stump of a bush.

Hudson Bowley tied his necktie anew and looked in the glass. He had chosen the green-plaid tie, the one with a little stripe of red in it, hoping it might make him look younger. After a glance in the glass he pulled it off and threw it on the floor and searched again in the top drawer.

"I like your blue one," said Lydia from a chair across the room. She was watching him with devoted eyes.

He turned from the rumpled confusion of the top drawer. "I haven't any blue one," he said, shortly.

"Yes, you have." She skipped down from her chair and approached him slowly.

He made no reply. He was holding out a purplish checked silk, regarding it with doubtful gaze.

"I wouldn't wear that!" she said. He cast it from him and followed it with a handful from the drawer. They lay tangled about his feet, and Lydia skirted them warily as she came. She mounted the chair beside him and slipped her hand under a handkerchief-case and drew out a trailing end.

"There is your blue one," she said, competently.

He gazed at it. "Um-m! I'd forgotten that one!" He took it from her and tied it and regarded it in the glass with a little satisfied pat.

"That 'll do!" he said.

Lydia looked on with deep approval. She glanced down at the scattered ties on the floor.

"I'll pick 'em up for you—and fold 'em."

"Throw them away. I never want to see them again—any of them!"

"Throw them away! Throw that away!" She held out the purplish silk with a tragic gesture.

He glanced at it indifferently, and then at her face, and smiled. "Perhaps you could make use of it?" he suggested, politely.

"I guess I could! And all of them!" She gathered them up with jealous hand. "I shall make a crazy-quilt for my doll," she said, with dignity.

"I would. That's about what they look like! Where are my gloves?"

"They are in the hall closet, where you left them," she supplied.

"Oh!" He turned away and took a stick from its corner and tested it a little. "Good-by," he said.

Lydia's eyes admired him openly. She followed him to the door. "You going somewhere?" she asked. It was as near as one might question a god.

"Oh—nowhere in particular," he replied.

But as he went down the stairs and out into the late glow of the July day he knew that he was going somewhere "in very particular," and he walked briskly. He did not want time to think. He had been thinking for more than a month—and for over a month he had been looking across Miss Cynthia's fence in silent amaze—and then into his own heart. Children came and went through Miss Cynthia's gate, and Cynthia, with the shining look and the little flush in her cheeks, had smiled and nodded to him every day as he passed. But not as if he counted—only as a part of the general happiness of life.

Hudson Bowley had been at first startled by Miss Cynthia's careless, happy recognition of him as he passed her gate, then he had been a little piqued, and finally indignant. And his indignation had grown. If Cynthia Adams thought she could treat him like an ordinary man—she would find she was mistaken! He swung his cane a little and walked on.

He reached the gate, and saw her with her watering-can standing among the flowers in the side yard. He opened the gate and came up the path.

She turned and saw him and put down the watering-can hastily.

"Why, Hudson! I am so glad to see you!"

He took her offered hand a little stiffly. This was no shy girl fluttered by romantic memories. He knew suddenly that he had been thinking of Cynthia as a starved soul. Her eyes twinkled at him like stars.

"Come in," she said. She led the way toward the house. But at the door he paused and hung back a little.

"Your garden is very beautiful!" he remarked.

"Yes, isn't it? The children have been helping me. Everything is coming on fast." She stood looking at it happily.

He gazed at the flowers with clouded eyes. He could not say what he had come to say—not to this glowing creature! The past was dead to her. And he had been hoping that when she saw him coming up the path she would remember, perhaps. He twirled his stick a little. She looked at him in surprise.

"Won't you come in?" Then her eyes on his face held a sudden wonder and disbelief. She turned toward the garden.

"Let us stay outside," she said, simply. "It is pleasanter out here."

He followed her dumbly. There was a little arbor at the end of the side garden where vines had been planted. They reached as yet barely to the low seats. But a tree cast a little shadow on the arbor, and Cynthia's books and work gave it a home-like air as they came in.

"Sit down," she said. "The children like it here." Her hands busied themselves with something on the table. He watched her silently. He had not thought he should be so dumb with Cynthia! And before he came he had been dreaming. ...

She looked up and caught his gaze, and the work dropped from her hands.

"Hudson!"

"Yes—?" It was courteous and non-committal.

But she seemed not to heed it or to check her impulse. "I have wanted—so much—to see you!" she said, breathlessly.

"You have wanted—?" He shook it off. "You seemed very happy with the children," he said, stiffly.

Her eyes regarded him wide. "I am happy with the children. Yes. I love to have them about me. But—!" She broke off. Her lip quivered.

Somewhere deep within him something stirred and his heart beat strangely. He moved toward her. But she did not notice or stir. Her eyes were resting on something unseen, something that shook the quiver on her lip to a little smile.

"And I thought love was something to take—or put aside—as I chose!" she said, humbly.

He reached his hand, almost timidly it seemed, and touched the clasped ones in her lap.

"And now—?" he said, quietly.

She turned with a smile—and he waited, the strong hand gripping a little on hers. She was looking at him with wide, misty eyes. She laughed out. The drops shook themselves away.

"Now there is nothing in the world but love—for everybody!"

His face flushed a little, and she laughed again swiftly.

"You do not understand, Hudson! But you will! You will! The children know."

"What do they know?" His voice was gentle and very happy, and Hudson Bowley knew that life had not passed him by. He would be as other men—as Jim and Mary! And he saw them with the worn light of happiness in their faces—and Lydia's small round head and red cheeks and the two straight braids of hair—and he saw all children in their love and helplessness. He was holding Cynthia close. Something like a sob came to him unawares and caught his throat.

She looked up and nodded. "You do understand!" she said.

Then he bent and kissed her. The voices of the children sounded close. They were at the gate. They were coming up the walk. And still he held her, till she put up her hands and drew back a little and looked at him with smiling, misty eyes. She went to the opening of the arbor and watched the children hurrying to her along the path.

Their voices laughed as they ran. "We've come, Miss Cynthia! We've come!" they called. "Where are you?"